Meaning Of Night In Elie Wiesel's Night

Have you ever thought about what certain words mean to you, what meaning they have to and what meaning the word has for someone else? When Elie was writing this book, originally it was a 862 page manuscript but of course, no one would want to read a book that was that long so it was shrunken into the book it is now. It has taught you and me the real meaning behind night. The extended metaphor and meaning of night is represented by the horrors they experienced, which then led to inhumanity normalizing which then finally left the lack of hope to survive. Night represents the horrors that come with going to the concentration camps, which then led to inhumanity normalizing which then finally led to the lack of hope to survive being consistent

As Elie became older and went through going to the camps, he realized that writing the book represents the horrors of what he went through to get to the point of liberation. In Night, Elie says “NEVER SHALL I FORGET that night, the first night in camp, that turned my life into one long night seven times sealed” (Wiesel, 34). .This connects back to the horrors he experienced because in this quote, Elie is saying that he will never forget how awful it was to experience that for the first time. How would it feel for you to experience what he did and how do you think it would affect you? No one in today’s time could ever relate to Elie and what he went through but we can try and think about what it would be like to go through what he did and how it would affect our maturity levels and mental well being. In the book Night Elie says the famous quote which is “Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.” This connects back to the horrors he experienced and how it affected him because he was never the same afterwards. In that very moment was when he went from a boy who worshiped his God to a man who had to fight for survival. It is important to know about how this book’s meaning and representation is the horrors he went through and how it affected him but it’s also important to realize that there are more reasons and meanings to the book NIght. One

The lack of survival was huge in the camps because they were work/death camps for the weak and “useless” prisoners. No one had hope they were gonna make it out alive and that killed everyone’s mental well being. In Night, Elie is talking about their instincts and how they no longer exist in the camp, he said “The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us.” (Wiesel, 34). Their normal human instincts and emotions don’t exist anymore because they lost hope in everything, getting out, surviving the Nazis. They lost their hope to survive but they also lost their hope to live, to keep going. Many could argue that the hope of surviving and the hope to live, to keep going, is the same thing but it’s not. You can survive and not be “alive”. You keep going to live where their will to live was taken away from them at the beginning, like arriving at Birkenau. Once again in his famous quote, Never Shall I, Elie talks about losing his will to live and specifically says “Never shall I forget the nocturnal silence that deprived me for all eternity of the desire to live.”(Wiesel, 34). These quotes show that their will and their hope to live was taken straight from the beginning, when seeing those babies and seeing “the small faces of the children whose bodies I saw transformed into smoke under a silent sky.”( Wiesel, 34). Elie in that moment, was completely changed and lost everything he had ever